Lyons: Backing up a little bit on the backflow

Good news for 18,000 Sarasota County water customers who pay the county for annual backflow inspections: The next five months are free.

Not the water. That will cost the same as usual. But until January, all monthly backflow-device inspection fees are being canceled.

That reflects some good news in a department that has mostly had the other kind of late. Screw-ups in fixing botched billing for inspections that were never done had led, two months ago, to the resignation under pressure of Utilities Director Jody Kirkman.

The fees now being suspended won’t bring anyone a huge windfall. A typical residential customer, if he or she has a backflow-prevention valve device in the front yard, pays $2.53 per month as an add-on to the water bill.

But the $30 paid over the course of the year brings in roughly double what the county now pays the four low-bid contractors now doing the annual inspections. So, Assistant County Administrator Mark Cunningham said Friday, starting this month, the fee is being suspended.

When reinstated on monthly bills in 2014, Cunningham expects it will be at a “significantly reduced” rate, if county commissioners approves a price adjustment that will soon be proposed.

But there’s no truth to the rumor, a version of which someone sent anonymously to the Herald-Tribune, that the backflow inspection program has been canceled. State and federal regulations still require backflow devices for many homes, especially ones with pools or ponds or old well systems in place. Such features create a theoretical potential for non-purified water to be sucked into the county water system, if a hose is in the wrong place at some moment when the county system somehow loses water pressure and causes a backflow.

Contamination incidents are rare, and any related health problems even more so, but the rules require annual inspections of the backflow prevention valves just in case.

As you may have read in previous columns, the county had royally botched that inspection process. For a few years, the inspection bills went out like clockwork even though thousands of inspections were never done.

Kirkman lost his job because, after being assigned to identify and issue credits to all those improperly billed, he was slow to tell County Administrator Randall Reid that the refund process also blew up. Reid said then that thousands of customers got credits they weren’t supposed to get.

Details of the improper credits, totalling roughly $99,000, are still being sorted out, Cunningham said Friday.

Another $117,000 in credits went to 4,328 customers who were supposed to get them, Cunningham said. All had paid for annual inspections that were not done for at least one year, and often several — a problem the department all but ignored as evidence mounted.

Maybe that is all behind the county now. But I hope water customers will keep in touch if they see anything weird. Though a revamped software system is supposed to keep better tabs on inspections, there are still human factors.

And I wonder: Can all those annual inspections really be done at the current cut-rate that bidders agreed to last year?

Cunningham says a plan for monitoring that is still being worked out.

It could be tough. If inspectors start skimping, it won’t be as easy to see as when a lowball mowing contractor just started letting the county grass grow.

How the heck do you tell when an inspector just slapped a new sticker on a pipe without testing the valve?

Tom Lyons can be contacted at tom.lyons@heraldtribune.com or (941) 361-4964.